Zynga Launches Social Gaming Platform

This may not be as big as the Facebook platform but it’s pretty significant. Zynga Networks, the social gaming network created by Mark Pincus, has announced that they are opening their network to third-party game publishers and developers. When launching a game on this network, publishers and developers will gain access to social gamers on Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, Meebo and MySpace. This is the same strategy that Facebook took and this definitely has the potential to work.

If you think of Pogo.com, the online gaming site owned by Electronic Arts, they have had to develop each one of the games on their site. Yahoo had a similar game portal (they still do but it is not as active anymore) that hosted a plethora of games but it was limited to what Yahoo! developers could produce. This new service lowers the barriers for developers, grants them access to millions of users and also provides them with ways to monetize their applications.

This is a win/win situation for both developers and Zynga. Developers get widespread exposure and Zynga gains brand recognition as the go to network for social games. Zynga owns some of the most popular gaming applications on Facebook and other social networks and has been steadily increasing their reach over the past few months. We covered the network back in January and since then Zynga has continued to gain momentum. If there is one area to be bullish on in social networks, social gaming is it.